By Tim Mitchell, CEO at CreatorOS
I’ve had conversations with several brands recently who want to get into creator marketing as they believe large language models (LLMs) will soon start reading Instagram and TikTok, in the same way they already read the open web. It’s not a wild bet.
Google recently announced creators and brands can now link their social media accounts to Google search console, and the belief across the advertising industry is that LLMS will have access to more video data across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube in the near future. Once that happens, creator content stops being a nice-to-have for brand awareness and starts being listed in a new type of results page.
From keywords to context
Anyone who worked in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 15 or 20 years ago will recognise the shape of what’s coming. Back then, brands built out thousands of keywords so they’d show up wherever people were searching. Creator marketing is heading the same way, except the searchable content isn’t a landing page, it’s a video. Brands are going to need to cover a wider range of topics, niches and search intents than they already do today, and creator content is how they’ll do it.
Some brands making five videos a month are going to need closer to a hundred. That’s not a budget increase; it’s an operating model change. Most in-house teams aren’t about to hire three or four extra people just to hit that volume, so the shift will likely come from wider creator partnerships, rather than bigger internal teams.
This is a genuine shift in how creator marketing will be justified internally. It took years for SEO to earn a place at board level, but once it did, the logic became simple: we need to appear in organic search. Creator marketing is about to get that same logic attached to it. Consumers are already asking AI tools for recommendations and there’s now a race to be the top answer.
Genuine authority
It will be interesting to see how LLMs decide which creator content deserves to be surfaced. It won’t be surface-level view counts. LLMs will have proper access to share rate, engagement rate and, most importantly, average watch time. They will also consider the authority of the creator, just like a website has authority in SEO. So, choosing the right creators will become increasingly important.
A brand that’s bought a million views, through a creator partnership, with an average watch time of a second or two hasn’t bought authority, and won’t count for much once AI starts weighing content this way.
This also changes how brands should think about who they work with. Creators index for topics in the same way a website does. A gardening creator carries gardening authority; a car creator carries car authority and an LLM reconciling a recommendation will take that into account alongside the viewer’s own context and needs. Two people typing the same question will still be pointed toward different answers, so picking creators for topical credibility, not just reach, is going to matter more than ever.
Getting the brief right
Brands still think a million views is a win. It isn’t, if nobody’s watching. I’ve seen brands buy that scale and then find their average watch time sitting at around 1.2 seconds, at which point the real question isn’t how many views you bought, it’s what value did you actually get for that budget. Better briefs start with data, not guesswork: know what watch time you’re aiming for, why you’re doing creator in the first place, and what good looks like before the brief goes out.
Creator marketing has historically been split across awareness or conversion and brand campaigns or trackable clickthrough. AI search collapses that split. The same piece of content must now do both jobs. It needs to win the visibility and authority that gets it surfaced by an LLM in the first place, and then actually convert the person watching it, because that video might be the moment someone’s mid-decision on whatever they’re buying.
That means brands can finally get a genuine full-funnel view of a creator campaign, from first view through to site conversion, instead of treating awareness and performance as two separate budgets with two separate scorecards.
Five actions for brands to take now
So, how should brands looking to tap into creator marketing, to improve AI searchability, get started? My recommendations include:
1: Map your keyword universe to video.
Treat your topics and customer questions the way an SEO strategy would, and use creator content to cover them properly rather than relying on a handful of campaigns.
2: Track watch time and engagement, not just views.
These are the signals AI systems will use to judge authority, so they should be what brands optimise for internally too.
3: Choose creators for topical authority, not just audience size.
The right creator brings credibility that both an LLM and a viewer will recognise.
4: Write briefs that reflect the full funnel.
A brief now needs to consider awareness as well as conversion, because AI search is starting to connect them both into one journey.
5: Plan for longer-term partnerships, not one-off hits.
Scaling from a handful of videos a month to dozens, or hundreds, isn’t something most in-house teams can absorb alone, and deeper relationships with more creators will do more for authority than one-off spikes.
None of this works without better briefing. The mistake I still see most often is a single generic brief sent to every creator on a list, expecting a similar result from each of them. Every creator has built their audience through a specific style and a specific relationship of trust. A brief that ignores that is asking them to work against the very thing that gives them authority in the first place. Good briefs start from the creator, not the campaign, and they deserve the same care whether they’re going to a creator with five thousand followers or five hundred thousand.
Brands need to stop measuring creator marketing the way they used to. Being watched, trusted and recommended is what AI search will soon start rewarding. The brands that treat this as a chance to tap into creator marketing, with better briefs and real partnerships instead of one-off projects, are the ones that will benefit from this opportunity.
Scale is coming either way. The only question is whether it’s built on volume for its own sake, or on the kind of authority that is discoverable and memorable, for both human beings and AI
